How (not) to use optimization rules in actions

Actions in SAP CRM are used to trigger processes based on events.

For example, when a lead is created in the system, you can implement an action on the event ‘Lead created’ to send an email to the person responsible for the customer the lead was created for.

Once the event is raised, the implemented schedule conditions will be evaluated. The system will check if the subject (in this case the lead) complies to the set of conditions. If this is the case, the action will be planned. If not, obviously nothing happens.

After scheduling the action (depending on the action setting ‘process time’), the start conditions will be evaluated. This set of conditions determines if the action is allowed to be executed now, or if the system should wait for a different state (i.e. the object changing to another status, or, more likely, a certain moment in time).

Previous articles on actions can be found here.

Let’s take a look at a more complicated requirement. Let’s say we would like the following action to take place.

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Send an email to the responsible employee 10 days before a lead’s end date, but only if the lead has status open and is qualified as ‘checked’.
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This would require us to do the following:
– Create the [enddate – 10] date in the date profile.
– Create the action to send the email
– Create a schedule condition to determine whether the lead meets the requirements for sending the email at all (for instance qualification = ‘checked’ and status = ‘open’).
– Create a start condition to determine whether the action should be sent yet.

The action to send the mail would have processing time ‘Processing using a selection report’. This particular processing time is used when creating actions that need to be started at a later time (such as the example at hand).

As the schedule conditions are evaluated every time the object is saved, the start conditions will automatically prevent the action from being processed if the status does not comply.

SPPFP

In order for actions to be processed, batch program called ‘SPPFP’ has to be scheduled.

SPPFP will select all scheduled actions (based on the selection criteria entered) and per action evaluate the start conditions. If the start condition is evaluated as OK, the action will be executed, in our case sending the email.

Performance

You can imagine that if you use a lot of postponed actions, the SPPFP job might take a long time to evaluate all the actions periodically (usually daily). Depending also on the complexity of the evaluation, the performance of the system as a whole, etc, this can become problematic. There are a few things you can do to prevent this:

1. Use schedule conditions rather than start conditions where possible.
2. Try to prevent OR operators.
3. Use object attributes rather than methods
4. Prevent using linked objects
5. Use optimization rules.

Optimization rules

How not to use optimization rules